Riel & Hilary

Hilary Wainwright in conversation with Riel Miller 

Hilary: How and when did you first meet Robin?

Riel: My connection with Robin came out my interest in Community Economic Development and following his innovative work at the GLC. I was an economist at the OECD (after doing PhD work at the New School for Social Research in New York). I was looking at community economic development and came across Robin’s work at the GLC and started to follow it. Then, and this is the important step in the story, a social democratic government won office, somewhat unexpectedly, in Ontario. And there weren’t many people around with experience in introducing social democratic policies in an innovative way. There were plenty of conventional, ‘welfare state’ type policies in place but little that was innovative, locally driven and ‘bottom up’. At that time, I was advisor to Floyd Laughren, Finance Minister, Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister of the Ontario Government from 1990 to 1995.

At the time I was a civil servant in the Ontario Government and ended up being ‘seconded’ over to Floyd’s office to be his technical (not political) advisor. Floyd was a very progressive guy, represented the mining town of Sudbury and was open to finding new ways to advance a social democratic agenda. Eventually, to make a long story short, one of the projects we cooked up, in light of the major industrial downturn that Ontario experienced in that period, was an initiative called ‘Jobs Ontario’. Part of this initiative included an innovative, bottom-up community economic development program.

Hilary: A bit like London?

Riel: Exactly. That was one of the attractions of learning from London because we were facing similar structural challenges. Though Ontario’s economy was resource dependant and export based (to the US).This all happened a long time ago now, so my recollections may not be as detailed or accurate as I’d like, but I believe the community economic development part of ‘Jobs Ontario’ had a budget  of CAD$300m. The idea was to go into communities and work with them to create a bottom up approach to creating value. Mapping their capacity and desire to create value through new local initiatives. In particular we intended to work with communities to recognise ways of creating well being that weren’t as reliant on the expectation that the only way ahead involved replacing an old smoke stack industry (these were mostly single industry towns/communities) with a new industrial giant that would come in and save the community. [Note: for a summary of the approach see my 1996 publication: Territorial Development and Human Capital in the Knowledge Economy: Towards a Policy Framework]

To implement the CED part of ‘Jobs Ontario’ we needed to put together a team with the relevant skills and experience. I made the case to the senior politicians who I knew—including the minister responsible for the community economic development portfolio, which was in the training and industrial policy side of things—that we really needed some important expertise at a senior level. That's when I made the pitch that Robin was needed for the team. And the Ministers agreed, and a special outreach was organized so that Robin could join us in Toronto – to the best of my recollection in 1993.

I made the transition over from the Ministry of Finance to the Ministry of Industry to work with Robin and the team directly. We had three senior managers for the project with staff that fanned out across the province. Robin and I travelled to many different parts of Ontario, initiating relationships that tried to flesh out the value chains and the potential for economic development involving the community. There was an important emphasis on agriculture, and on the question of how communities could become more connected to healthy, ecologically sound ways of living at the same time as creating value in their community.

I recall going with Robin to the Niagara Peninsula—the southernmost part of Canada, where there's wine growing and a lot of agriculture, tomatoes, things like that. We started by looking at cooking. We looked at the questions of knowledge diffusion and how people were not sourcing their food from healthy local producers, but rather packaged, expensive food — with the obvious consequences both for the supply side and the demand side. We tried to encourage knowledge-sharing. This meant something quite interesting in a country like Canada where there are a lot of immigrants, and where the knowledge about cooking actually goes from grandmothers to nobody. Drawing out those kinds of knowledge flows, and how they connect up to the industrial value creation—the tissue of communities—was something that I found very powerful. It benefitted hugely from Robin's knack, his exceptional ability to put people at ease and, at the same time, disrupt their thinking.

He had a charm that really, I've never seen anybody display before or since. It was a charm that enabled people to be confident about doing things they hadn't imagined even a few minutes before. They were imagining things that were completely new to them and then, boom, they were running off and inventing and connecting. His enthusiasm, and sense of potential, was so contagious, complicit, and empathetic that he created a completely new dynamic.

This was absolutely fundamental to pursuing a community economic development strategy that was not the conventional, top-down, 'let's imitate Silicon Valley, how can we make more patents' type of approach; rather, it was about how we can generate creative communities that are attending to their own wellbeing on the basis of their own values. It was, to me, a wonderful demonstration of the importance of understanding that policy is not just this narrow, technocratic, extrapolatory way of looking at the world, which takes best practice, grafts it on to some other being, and says: 'Now you've got that appendage, go out and do it.' Robin demonstrated, in both the theory and the practice, a much more holistic, much more organic, genuine and authentic way of thinking about collective action.

Hilary: How far was he able, with you, to establish any kind of process of popular education, or capacity building? I completely recognise what you say about the encouraging, confidence building way he worked with people — but he could not be everywhere. In the GLC we had a strategy for developing popular economic literacy, a form of popular education. I've always wondered how replicable that was. Was there any process of that kind? Not necessarily in a very didactic way, but simply the kind of people who are often already there in the community being supported to be animators of community based economic development.

Riel: It's a good question. For context, I left Ontario relatively soon after all that. It was around the same time Robin left. I left in 1994.

Hilary: What does that mean about how long he was there?

Riel: My recollection is two years.

Hilary: That's long enough to get something going.

Riel: Absolutely. The thing is though—and we need a lot of elements in this picture—to a certain extent I felt parachuted in – given my personal history, largely growing up outside of Canada. Certainly, Robin was parachuted in. Although the context was open to doing fairly radical things we didn’t start with a blank slate. There was a whole constellation of existing conditions. For instance in all of the local initiatives we needed to work closely with the on-the-ground civil servants. They were the people responsible for the ministry of industry activities in single-industry towns, or some of the other ministries that administered programs for disadvantaged, or underdeveloped regions. Based on their experience, expectations and the command-control  bureaucratic power structures, it was not surprising that the civil servants were waiting for directives, and they were waiting for criteria for spending programmes related to specific targets. Their willingness or ability to nurture the emergent—to use mapping of a community's capabilities as an approach that would endogenously generate ideas and new possibilities—was very, very limited. They were very uncomfortable with such a process and its lack of ex-ante outcomes and benchmarks based on the past.

Hilary: Could they see the point of it, or not?

Riel: I have to say—and I think this remains an issue for civil servants, partly by nature of the system, partly through selection bias of the people who opt into this—they are pretty much looking for instructions. It's a lot of work and a lot of responsibility to take a collaborative, emergent approach.

I have to tell a story. A brilliant Robin Murray moment. It was right in the early days of him being in Toronto. We went out for lunch and we went to a sandwich shop. I tell this story regularly when I'm giving talks – it is such a good way to illustrate Robin’s sensitivity to capability-based issues and the impact of power relationships that are so often hidden. We were in Toronto at lunchtime and went to a sandwich shop near the office. It was one of these typical Canadian sandwich shops of the time, where there were 15 different types of filling and different types of bread. The idea was that you compose your own sandwich. Robin takes one look at this cornucopia of choices, turns to the person behind the counter and says to them: “Look, there are just too many choices here. Why don't you choose for me?" And the person behind the counter didn't hesitate.  "I'm not paid to do that”. He said, “it's not my job, too bad." Right there a Robin moment, these are not minor issues. Who is going to take responsibility for making choices? Who has the role and prerogative to consider the consequences of making choices? Who has the liberty and capability to articulate their desire? Do we expend time and energy on what might be considered such excessive choice – why should we care? And how do we take into account the far from neutral aspects of hierarchical command-and-control employment systems and social orders? In one small gesture, a chippy and chipper remark Robin charged a situation with a vast range of questions, with all sorts of implications about who you are, what you do, what bothers you. All issues we were in the thick of trying to work through in the context of community economic development in Ontario but also from a more historical and societal, perspective in terms of the big questions of the nature and role of human agency and our relationships to change. To tie this back to your point about developing some sort of infrastructural, or sustained way of nurturing capabilities — I guess in the end the ground was not particularly fertile. We were doing one-off community-based activities as a band of, if not quite outlaws, then certainly peculiar creatures who were probably pretty incomprehensible to not only the civil servants but bureaucrats of all stripes – including the local mayor, high school principal, president of the chamber of commerce and trade union local. We were basically trying to subvert the existing power structures and the fundamental accounting frameworks that signal what is considered valuable or not, including the conventional signs of social status.

Hilary: You describe the civil servants very vividly, what about the people you were talking to? How far were they, in some sense, already taking initiatives or wanting to? When we did our popular planning there was an assumption that we would go where there was initiative, or resistance — where there was some seed of activity and creativity. Were there such seeds in the communities you visited? When you and Robin went around, were there, for example, women already getting together to prepare their own recipes? Doing things which they didn't think of as economic but where there was some social relation—not exactly of production, but—informal household work.

Riel: Yes, but I think Robin would probably have had a more upbeat take on this than I do. We definitely were selecting places where there was a willingness, an invitation — so we were not imposing ourselves. On the other hand, we also had quite a nice carrot. With CAD$300million to spend on this community economic development project, there were projects that key players in the community were very enthusiastic about seeing funded. People were keen to open the door and say, 'How can we become part of this?' We were encouraging them, obviously, to put together applications for funding for projects we thought would leverage local communities, local networks, and the potential of specific communities in specific places. All of that was quite conducive to generating interest and activities. The first round of discussions in almost every town that we went to, was with the mayor, the local trade union leadership, the local chamber of commerce leadership, the high school, maybe a university but generally speaking these were small towns, sometimes a community college in the area. Meeting with those people—still mostly men —led to a very conventional and typical first reaction. They believed that because none of the workers—again mostly men—had high school diplomas, they were screwed. Their attitude was how can we find a way to incentivise the return of a large multinational that will produce paper, steel, glass, mining, or whatever had been the main industry? Basically, how do we go back to the past? That initial reaction, and that initial desire, to use the community economic development money as an incentive for the return of the past, was pretty dominant and pretty pervasive. Somewhat disruptively our project was trying to get at the interstices, the fissures, and the liminal parts of the community and tease out the potential. We were always saying: 'Ok, you do have 3,000 workers who spent the last 25 years doing something dangerous, that required strong collective effort, with huge problem-solving capabilities—whether its forestry, glass manufacturing, or the automotive sector—do you really think these competencies have no value because they don't have a high school diploma?' There was a little bit of head scratching there, but also a clear confrontation with the old power structures which developed during the post-war industrial era. They didn't know what to do. So, we often had to work with the marginal and the unconventional.

Hilary: So you had to find a way to get beyond those officials. How did you do that? Often officials are kind of gatekeepers. I imagine that Robin played a part in managing to wangle your way through to meet people?

Riel: Absolutely. It requires time on the ground. You have to be there with people. You have to be present and show them your commitment, sincerity, solidarity and engagement on the ground. That meant we had to travel around the province a lot. The ability to gatekeep in small communities is relatively limited. It spills over pretty quickly into other people who are not part of any big bureaucracy or big structure. Since we tried to target activities like cooking, for instance; or the relationship between agriculture and the local community; or between the industry they'd been in, which was something like woodworking and the potential to think about ecological issues —for example , we’d ask how to do things in a sustainable way around renewable forestry resources, and the movement to renewable. There was always that side of things. Usually they did accept our requests to push past the official channels and get involved with local people. It's serendipitous. Is there a little group or someone who the community has confidence in? We did end up with lots of different little communities. I don't know what happened afterwards. For one thing, the Government changed. The programmes changed. The policies changed. So how much that actually fed into a transitional organisation, or transitional thinking, or empowerment, I don’t know.

Hilary: Maybe two years isn't long enough but was it long enough to at least see whether those creative discussions produced any productive relationships? Did they lead to any new food chain, or links between agriculture and food production, or production and restaurants or shops?

Riel: I don't have smoking guns on this one, but certainly it was in the air. A lot of that did move forward a lot. They built up relationships between Toronto and the farming communities. In fact, I know some people who moved out of Toronto into the hinterland, as it were, to nurture healthier, more organic approaches. All of that was something that was happening. I haven't been back to Canada since then to live or work, I visit now and again but not really that part of Ontario. Ontario's a big place and travelling around to some of those more distant communities is not an easy thing to do. There were key people in the team who were young doctoral students, or post-docs, who I think did follow through, from the point of view of doing some research and looking at how that had knock-on effects. My recollection, and I haven't consulted this in some time, was that they found it very fertile. But, at the end of the day, it was relatively small. The economy kicked back in its more conventional form. Basically, the world moved on from the point of view of our experimental and subversive community economic development initiative.

Actually, it would be a fun thing to do to go back and retrace some of this. There was definitely a small community that grew up around the work we were doing. I’d love to help trace how they and the ideas we were trying to cultivate have developed or spread. We saw the potential, in the sense that there was already a transition starting to happen.

Hilary: When you say a transition starting to happen, what do you mean?

Riel: What I mean is that the food culture was shifting, just to take the case of Toronto. It was not alone, but it was one of the things we started to explore. I started some research but never managed to finish it. The knowledge intensity of food production was shifting. Restaurants were becoming more attentive to a variety of different regional and specific innovations. There was more competition and distinction taking place within the restaurant community. Then, of course, it spilled over into home cooking and the way the food chain—including the supermarkets and the supply side for consumers—diversified and became sourced from the local communities. In Canada people were aware, of course, that our food was coming in from far away, that it was a northern country, etc., and that freshness and organic, non-pesticide, non-fertiliser sources were important issues. It was perhaps not highly political in the sense of climate change, or in the sense of the agricultural industrial complex, as it were. But it was an intensification of the knowledge and the connectivity—the relationships, the networking—that I think perhaps laid some of the groundwork for people to begin to argue about more significant transitions, in the context of climate change, and the motivation climate change provides.

Hilary: Robin was very good, wasn't he, at picking up those pre-political emergences — social relations that were changing and emerging in ways that couldn't be labelled easily as either political or even very conventionally economic. He could sniff them out somehow and connect with them. Seeing the potential was a very important skill he had.

Riel: I like to think I share his proclivity, and also the talent, that Robin had for teasing out what, in some circles, is called ideation — teasing out the implications and potential of glimpses and glimmers of something else. Some people call those weak signals, meaning things that in the present are unnamed or inarticulate — the potential of which is perhaps not going to go anywhere, so therefore they don't seem significant, because they haven't yet become something significant. Being able to imagine, or build up the scenario, was something that Robin was tremendously talented at. And he wouldn't give up. He had this fabulous passion and absolutely inexhaustible energy for saying: 'Well what about ... and couldn't this ... and might that.' He'd tease out and, in that sense, cultivate the connections, speculating along the lines that: 'If we tease this out, doesn't this connect to that, doesn't this have a linkage to this.' He continuously sparked the entrepreneurial moment, if I can use the term entrepreneurial in a neutral way.

Hilary: If you've got some money that can somehow make those connections real, that really helps.

Riel: We were looking to seed initiatives, absolutely. I think this is one of the interesting ongoing debates, as it were, about the world around us—the theory of science, or the theory of the world around us—does the real generate the possible, or does the possible generate the real (see Henri Bergson)? I think there was a very strong sense in what we were trying to do—and that is what Robin's attitude conveyed—which is that you don't know what's possible in advance. You're not just picking off a menu as if it was some technocratic exercise where you determined, ex ante, what's going to be the profitable, the positive, the lucrative, or the functional; but rather, by teasing, and watering and cultivating the unknowable, you gradually turn that into something. This is not a planner's perspective on the world. This is a gardener's, or creative perspective on the world.

Hilary: It connects with that experience in the sandwich shop, doesn’t it? Maybe what Robin was trying to do, instinctively, was find out what this guy would choose, so he would say: 'You choose.' Then you can imagine there would be a conversation. This guy would begin to choose and say: 'Well, what kind of a person are you, do you like this or that?' This relationship would develop and reveal things.

Riel: It was always exploratory — trying to find the hook to let our curiosity and our explorations take us where it may. In the case of the sandwich bar though, Robin was also reacting to the burden of consumerism. It was also symptomatic, I think. Here's where Robin and I would sometimes diverge. He felt it was just excessive. It was a symptom of excess, and the distortion or exploitation of people's desire for newness, for fashion, for things that are superficial and highly ephemeral. I was not as judgemental about it, in a way. Robin and I would argue about this for hours. In my opinion there is a part of excess which is very creative, including failure. There's also, I think, a key component related to capability. I was more prone to simply leave it as ambiguous and be open to whatever it might produce without knowing in advance whether it would be good. There is an interesting discussion to be had, and I don't think there's any single answer here.

Hilary: You mean there is an experimental component in excess: like what will this taste like?

Riel: This is an important part of my later work on Futures Literacy: the refinement of taste, for example, is of necessity an experimental process. If we take the cooking example again, if people are going to refine their cooking then they have to experiment and they will end up cooking some things they don't like. They also need to taste some things that completely stretch their thinking, and are outside, or orthogonal, or disruptive, or paradigmatically different. It offers us a broader base for experimentation. Partly, and again I think this reflects the work that I've done, my feeling is that there is no way to know how that's going to happen in advance. You can create the conditions for experimentation. You can invite people to do it. You can change the rationales for experimenting. And perhaps this last aspect was somewhat under-theorized at the time. I've always felt that this is harder to program. I'm uncomfortable because I think it's an issue around scale, and where scale fits. We were trying to do this community economic development programme. We were trying to set criteria out. We were trying to set out rules. We were trying to create it so that civil servants could help us with it, so that people could follow the programmes, so they could apply. That scaling dimension to it always made me feel very nervous because, for me, it was all too much about pre-empting the future.

Hilary: Yes, you mean once you start scaling, particularly within our existing hierarchical institutions, it opened the way to the introduction of the methodology of planning and predicting.

Riel: It sets up a whole expectational framework which relates to success and failure, to satisfying the teacher—something we've been taught from a very early age, the teacher knows the answer—the whole technocratic disempowerment that is so prevalent. It fundamentally relates to a two-fold shift that seems so important to me. One, towards complexity as a state, meaning the world is complex. It's not more or less, it is complex, therefore it is unknowable in advance — and that unknowability is not a bad thing. What's crazy is to try and construct our agency as if we live in a different universe. Then the other aspect to it is that there is an experiential expression, living part to all this — which Robin embodied so well in the way he was. Incorporating that more into what we do, which includes affect, which includes values, and empathy, and all that. That's what living and doing things together is all about. With scalability and the technocratic, we pre-empt all this because we want to colonise tomorrow. We pre-empt our own imagination. We pre-empt our own relationships. We end up with these efficiency-focused and mechanical ways of being in the world which—from my point of view—is at the origin of climate change and the COVID pandemic shock. We are so arrogant and so fundamentally convinced of our superiority and our ability to fix problems, that we just blithely go on and do stupid, stupid things like considering carbon as something we can just use in excess without any consideration of the consequences; or we can use voyeuristic tourism as an industrial product without seeing the consequences of it. All of these are things that are obvious, ex-post, but are the outcome of a particular posture from the point of view of decision making and outcomes.

Hilary: It's a really interesting theme, or seam as Robin would say. Do you think that explains a bit, just to return to Robin, why he was always very wary about scalability? There was a jargon of scalability in the circles probably all of us were part of. We would be involved in something really rich at a micro level and then some clever clogs would come along and say: "Well, how is it scalable?" Robin would say: "Hang on a minute, do we want it to be scalable, and is scale the right thing? Scale means you disappear from the particular." He did have an uneasiness about scale. I wonder if what you're talking about is putting your finger on it.

Riel: Absolutely. I think it was reflected in his work on how people create collective intelligence, and how we can do social movements and social creativity. It was the rootedness of that. It's rooted in the specificity and the appreciation for the fact that specificity is what really nourishes not only innovation and invention, but also engagement, commitment, and authentic, respectful relationships. It was very fundamental to the way Robin saw the world and the way he conducted himself in the world. He was so good at it because he had prima facie confirmation of his hypothesis — there it was, that's the way it works, that's the way it happens. That was wonderfully reinforcing for me, I have to say, because it coincided with a lot of my own instincts. It was highly formative and enjoyable to work with Robin in those years and then subsequently, after the Ontario experience, we kept in touch and exchanged, debated, and worked together as best we could. It is wonderful to know that this is a living relationship really.

Hilary: As you were talking about the key features of Robin's understanding of specificity, and how much they were imbued in him and the way he lived — when we think about how to spread rather than scale, it points to a need for more people with that sensitivity. That points to the importance of a different kind of education. He often used to talk about the idea of a school for civil civil servants. I notice you talk about a learning society. Perhaps one important implication of the way he did things was the idea of a different kind of public education — or education of administrators, political leaders, and so on.

Riel: Absolutely. That was the community development model we were working with. You create a learning process, and the learning process is related to projects. It's what I call pull learning, not push learning. You want to know, you're motivated to know, and you're not doing it ex ante, as if you know what you'll need to know in the future. You're working on something that you want to know because you need to know it now. That model is project-based, intergenerational and collective. It was fundamental. This is something that feels very natural to me, and I think was reinforced by the experiences we had in Ontario — that demonstration effects are sufficient. In other words, you can't, and shouldn't, replicate in the sense of some scale or standard or norm, because the learning voyage is critical. The process is the product. The demonstration effect that people can learn, and have fun doing whatever they happen to be doing, is sufficient. It’s about spreading or diffusing rather than scaling. I think that’s the apt framing for this. We found that fairly naturally.

September 2020